In one of the wealthiest, most highly-educated counties in America, two illegal immigrants raped a 14 year-old girl during school hours. The crime occurred March 16 at Rockville High School, a few blocks from where I live in Montgomery County, Maryland.
The nationally reported crime cries out to have its true national significance exposed, in the supine mentality the locals have displayed. Rockville, with just under 70,000 residents, is the second largest city in Maryland and is just north of Washington, D.C.. Along with other cities and counties in Maryland and Virginia, it constitutes the bedroom community of the national bureaucracy–the administrative state. Boasting a median family income of $95,000, Montgomery (MoCo) is the 11th-wealthiest county in the U.S. The sophisticated attitudes of its politically influential denizens help shape national attitudes.
Life is pleasant in the well-regulated People’s Republic of MoCo. Its million residents enjoy highly ranked public schools, which people selective universities. Parks and novel ethnic restaurants are abundant, as are the subway delays and traffic gridlock.
Occasionally harsher realities intrude as in this month’s rape. Appropriately, the perpetrators’ illegal immigrant status and their ages (17 and 18 in the 9th grade), have drawn attention. But what’s truly remarkable is the supine reaction of the local government and many of my neighbors, who voice their opinions on the neighborhood website.
The bizarre reaction to the crime displays the mentality of the citizen-subject of the administrative state, in particular the sanctimony, unquestioned multiculturalism, and supine deference to political correctness, which lead to the worship of the Queen of Denial.
The neighbors say in their first reactions: counsel kids on consensual sex. Assume your kids could have done something that horrible too!
They say, don’t dwell on the immigration status of the rapists. Keep politics off the neighborhood website! A resident interviewed by Tucker Carlson was disparaged for posting her interview about the crime on the website, and thereby politicizing it.
They say, there is nothing abnormal here: An 18-year old in 9th grade. It happens all the time! At my daughter’s classes at another MoCo school, I saw girls and boys play in integrated physical education classes. In touch football she, along with most other girls, sensibly shied away from the football and the charging boys. The “game” was quite a farce, but what did the boys learn by blocking and hitting girls?
They say, the schools are peaceful. But MS-13 killings have rocked the area, including one involving a 17-year old girl from another MoCo high school in a neighboring town. The mother of one MS-13 victim had moved from Central America to flee the gangs.
They say, this episode shouldn’t affect the current welcoming policy. This supercilious attitude comes through full-throated in the statements of the MoCo Superintendent of Education and the President of the Rockville City Council, complete with denunciations of racism. Of course some local publications have defended officials or simply failed to report dubious statements harmful to the cause of multiculturalism.
Do the local bureaucrats feel captured by hostile natives? MoCo has become a majority-minority county, reflected in its schools. “The school district in 2016-2017 is 30 percent Hispanic, 29 percent white, 22 percent black and 14 percent Asian,…” In the County non-Hispanic whites are around 45%, with Hispanics and blacks at 19% each, and Asians at 17% (all as of 2015).
MoCo’s dependence on federal spending has produced more sanctimonious liberalism, in Christopher Caldwell’s fine phraseology. MoCo seeks to parry Trump’s threat to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions while continuing to preen their moral superiority. A county spokesman contends there will be cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on “serious” cases but otherwise police will continue the policy of not checking on immigration status.
Jessica Vaughn, Research Director of the invaluable Center for Immigration Studies, observed that “When Northern Virginia cracked down around 2005 … many illegals moved to Montgomery County, where they knew they would be treated more leniently.”
On the national level the reliable MoCo liberals are carved up to supply Democrat votes in three congressional districts, including the infamous third district that sprawls from beyond Baltimore and runs north past the immediate zip code to my east. MoCo subjects are reliable cogs for liberal planning purposes.
Unfortunately for the sanctimonious, the Rockville horror took place just as sanctuary state legislation passed the overwhelmingly Democratic Assembly. The anti-Trump Republican Governor Larry Hogan vowed to veto the bill. Some plucky Chinese immigrants have had enough and lobbied against sanctuary status, pitting them against the Chinese-American establishment.
When the lawyer for one of the rapists announced that he would argue (against the police report) that the sex was consensual, the allegation was met with outrage from the citizens and silence from the sanctimonious. But he was simply following the initial reactions on our neighborhood website about consensual sex. He also echoed local government officials that his client “is being used as an unjust scapegoat by the opponents of recent immigration practices.”
The attorney is also chair of the Maryland State Bar Association’s Immigration Law section.
The icing on the cake: MoCo is where newly anointed Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez won his only elective office, as a member of the County Council. His proposals (for unionizing domestic workers, among others) were so radical he could not have won reelection so he went on to other, appointed offices. He was also a founder of CASA de Maryland (originally known as the “Central American Solidarity Association of Maryland”), which describes itself as the State’s largest Latino and immigrant rights organization.
With the sheepish acquiescence on display in this month’s child rape, MoCo shows itself for a flock of useful idiots for the administrative state. Bureaucracy’s bedroom gives decorum lessons to the elite that comprises the national bureaucracy.